Personal post: number one - Sociologists use Twitter to obverse "late-day slumps" in users
A close up of an computer screen showing twitter.com, a social networking and blogging website.
I can bet that everyone uses at least some form social media such as Twitter or Facebook. Our status updates or "tweets", more often than not, tend to be something about our moods or imply something about the mood we're in. That's why sociologists have decided to use "tweets" on Twitter to observe the patterns of our moods throughout the day. They observed more then 2.4 millions tweets from 84 different countries and divided them up by hours of the day and days of the week. The mood patterns showed that our moods tend to drop just after breakfast. All countries showed these patterns, despite the different cultures. They then decided to run them through a program developed by psychologists which gives back one of hundreds of different words such as "happy", "anxious" and "fearful" to measure feelings. Overall, they observed that people are most upbeat in the morning and their mood goes down from there. Just after supper on through the time they go to bed, it picks up again. At first, scientist thought this might be because of the stress of the work (or in our case school) day. But the weekday patterns were almost identical to the weekend patterns. They tend stated that sleep plays a huge factor on our daily mood patterns, based on previous research. But this isn't the only way sociologists are using social media to observe human behavior. They also use it to do other studies such as what makes people the happiest, or even using it to track diseases and epidemics! All in all, social media allows sociologists and behavior scientists to observe human behavior and interaction in ways that haven't been able to before. The only thing we need to keep in mind is these are just people who have access to Twitter. As sociologist Thomas Streeter says, "these aren't farmers in Zimbabwe."
Spontaneous animal explosion?! In April of 2005, body's of amphibians were discovered in a pond near Hamburg, in Germany. The body's were toads, swollen to the point were they had burst! Their body's were three and a half times their normal size. People said they would see the frogs crawling along the ground and they would begin to swell. The frogs would swell so much they would just explode right on the spot. Scientists suspected that there must be some sort of virus or fungi in the pond which was infecting the toads, causing them to swell and burst.
Eventually though, one scientist, Frank Mutschmann, came to a conclusion. They noticed small circular incisions on the backs of all the dead toads. These holes were small enough to be the incision of a bird's beak. Surely enough, he discovered all of these toads livers were missing! These toads had been murdered by a bunch of hungry crows. The crows were clever enough to know that a toads skin is poisonous, so it wouldn't be any good to eat anyways. The crows made an incision, extracted the liver of the toad and ate it! Once the toad realizes its liver is missing, it puffs up as a defense mechanism. Since it has no ribs and now no liver, there is nothing to hold the rest of its organs inside. It's lungs inflated and ripped, and the rest of the organs just expel themselves. Mutschmann thinks this phenomenon occur because it was the frogs mating season. While the frogs were busy, the crows came down and pecked them on the back, extracting their liver. The process wouldn't be particularly painful, so the frogs wouldn't really notice. Citations - Mystery of german exploding toads. (2005, April 27). Retrieved from http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4486247.stm Elkins, R. (2005, May 8). Stone the crows! exploding toad case solved. Retrieved from http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/stone-the-crows-exploding-toad-case-solved-489894.html
Personal post: number three -
His twin was living inside him......
Sanju Bhagat had always been conscious of his abnormally large belly. He was living in the village of Nagpur, India went one night, he could barely breath. He was rushed to the hospital, as the doctors thought he must have a large tumor on his diaphragm. They decided to operate immediately to re leave him of his symptoms. As Dr. Ajay Mehta cut into Sanju's body to remove the tumor, he found something completely horrifying. First, he saw a hand inside his stomach. Next, he pulled out limbs, hair, jaws, feet with long toenails, and even reproductive organs. Dr. Mehta was completely shocked and confused with what he found, a mutated body inside Sanju Bhagat's stomach. What really happen, was that Mehta had removed Sanju's twin from inside him, an extremely rare case of fetus in fetu. There are only about 90 cases of this recorded in medical history. How it happens is one fetus wraps around the other in the womb. One fetus becomes trapped inside the other, while the dominant fetus grows throughout the pregnancy. The trapped fetus lives of its host twin like a sort of parasite by forming a sort of umbilical cord structure that connects to the host's blood supply. Usually, both of the twins will die before birth due to the strain of sharing a placenta. But in Sanju's case, he was delivered and his twin continued to grow inside him. No one could have suspected that his own twin was living inside him for 36 years. There are people who do believe that this particular case is a hoax, although "fetus in fetu" is a true abnormality.
This is the video I found on the ABC news website... just a warning - they show some weird hand thing they supposedly found inside his stomach, so if you don't really enjoy that kind of stuff, I probably wouldn't watch it.
There isn't a plague that has really affected the world like the bubonic plague did during the fourteenth century. It was known as the Black Death, because of its notorious black patches it formed on the skin of the sick. The disease was spread through mice and other rodents aboard merchant ships. The fleas on these rodents would live off their blood, and eventually transfer the disease to the crew aboard the ship. Many of the sailors died immediately at sea, and the disease was spread as the ships docked all over Europe. Within three years, Spain, France, Russia and England were all infected. Sore limbs was the first sign of the plague. Next, the lymph glands would swell to the point that they would burst. These glands are located on the neck, armpits and groin. The bubonic plague is origin from the word Buboes, meaning swollen glands. Death by the plague was extremely swift, yet horrifying. It's victims were in immense pain as their bodies grew more grotesque with gruesome black markings. Europeans were completely terrified. Plague doctors were hired specially to treat those with the plague, count death tallies and investigate the disease. It was an extremely dangerous job.
The reason this disease was spread so easily was because of the Middle Age Europe's living conditions. People lived in extremely crowded surroundings were hygiene was not promoted. Citizens were advised not to bathe, as they believed the disease would enter through opened pores. Since the refrigerator had yet to be invented as well, people often ate diseased or stale meats. But, the devastation of the plague did lead to advances in medicine. Hospitals were built and new sanitation laws were enforced.
Personal post; number five - It's Physics, but..... The 10 Dimensions So I know this is Physics, and it is just a theory... but Mr. Smith showed our Physics class this video a few months ago now, and it blew my mind. Here is the video, inspired by the book "Imagining the Tenth Dimension" by Rob Bryanton. He explains the first 10 dimensions in his own theory... so watch the video now.... (you may even want to watch it a few times to really get it)
Mind blown right? I became interested in this, so I did a little further research on it. I found a little exert on how we perceive the dimensions. Technically, we are three dimensional creatures, but we only see things in two dimensions. Right now, you're probably thinking, what? I can see the third dimension, I can tell the difference between a 2D and 3D object. Yes, you can. But, that doesn't mean you're seeing it. Think of it this way, without a point of reference or light hitting an object, you can't see or perceive depth. If an object was moving away from you and expanding in equal proportion, how would you be able to tell that object was moving away from you? We only perceive the third dimension because of the points of reference around us, and the light that is constantly around us, giving the object different hues of light according to its distance from the light source (lighter at one end, darker at the other). We can't really see the third dimension, but there is no question that it is there. As three dimensional organisms, we can only see the second dimension and perceive the third.
This is just a theory. You can take want you want from it, I just thought it was wiki post worthy:)
Our genetics and how they decide whether we'll catch a flu or not
Ever wonder why some people are more prone to getting sick than others? To me, it seems like there are certain people who never seem to get sick and I've always wondered why. Alfred Hero and his team of researchers also wanted to know why, so they set up an experiment. They injected 17 volunteers with with a strain of a disease called H3N2 or Wisconsin. Out of these 17 volunteers, nine of them became sick. Some others injected reported feeling slightly under the weather, but they weren't actually ill. The researches then decided to study the activity of genes in the blood of the volunteers. They drew this blood from them prior to being injected with the flu and then again every eight hours for five days after the infection. The genes in the blood revealed some pretty astonishing patterns. They found that in the genes of those who got sick activated immune chemicals that caused inflammation. Their gene patterns could predict how sick they would get up to 36 hours before. The genes of those people who stayed well activated anti-inflammation as well as antioxidant. These gene patterns can help doctors determine what patients are at risk of becoming seriously ill. But, they still need to do a follow up study to determine whether the pattern is determined by a persons genetic makeup. The researches also found that those who became sick tended to spread more of the virus than those who stayed well. Therefore, gene activity patterns may be able to help determine which patients also need to be quarantined to help prevent the spread of infections or viruses.
The Hot Zone: Part One - The Shadow of Mount Elgon
The Hot Zone is a work of fiction about four, extreme pathogens who are all filoviruses: Ebola Zaire, Ebola Sudan, Ebola Reston and the Marburg virus. The first part of the Hot Zone is divided up into seven chapters. The novel begins by introducing Charles Monet, a French expatriate working and living in Kenya. He visits takes a trip to Mount Elgon around New Year's Day in 1980 and visits Kitum Cave. Soon after, he becomes extremely ill and has to be flown to a hospital, where he "crashes and bleeds out". While he is bleeding and vomiting uncontrollably, some of Charles' vomit gets into one of the doctor's eyes who was working on him; the doctor is Dr. Musoke. Charles Monet falls into a coma and isn't able to recover, so he dies of the deadly virus. Dr. Musoke falls ill with the same virus, but miraculously recovers 10 days later. No one knows why. The virus is later discovered to be the Marburg virus, a filovirus and a close relative of the Ebola virus. A young boy named Peter Cardinal also becomes ill with a relative of the Marburg virus, and soon after dies. Samples of his blood are also taken for research. A village in Sudan breaks out. The hospital is terrorized by the virus and is practically vacant. A young nurse named Nurse Mayinga is infected by a nun and later dies. Samples of her blood are collected by the CDC and taken back to Atlanta. Nancy Jaax is introduced. She gets the opportunity to work with the Ebola virus during her first time wearing a biological space suit. A small rip in her suit causes her to be exposed to the virus, but it does not enter her blood stream through the small cut on her hand, so she remains healthy. With the help of Gene Johnson, Nancy learns that the strain of virus can be transmitted through air when they conduct experiments on monkeys who are 20 feet apart and they all become ill and die, even those who were kept controlled. Gene Johnson then takes a team to Kitum Cave, in hopes of finding Ebola or Marburg in its natural habitat. He has no luck when none of the animals there are found to be carrying the virus.
Nurse Mayinga in the hospital, suffering from Ebola Zaire.
Homework post; number four -
The Hot Zone: Part Two - The Monkey House
The second part of the Hot Zone is about a monkey house in Reston, Virginia. Monkeys are imported her from the Philippines and then sold across the country. The main focus of this section is when one of the main workers at the monkey house, Dan Dalgard, notices some of the monkeys are getting sick. He is slightly worried, since all the monkeys are supposed to be checked to be healthy before entering the country. Soon, the illness starts spreading to other monkeys in that room of the monkey house, and then to other rooms in the monkey house. The monkeys are dying; it's suspected that it is a case of Simian fever, a disease very lethal to monkeys but does not harm humans. Dan Dalgard gets a bit more worried about the situation and the Army becomes involved. An intern at USAMRIID photographs the virions inside a piece of monkey meat sent from the monkey house and believes he has observed a filovirus, specifically Marburg. The heads of the department are called to confirm, and one it is confirmed, Nancy Jaax is assigned to dissect some monkeys and discover what type of virus it really is.
After dissecting the dead, liquefying monkey meat, Nancy can't tell whether it is Ebola Zaire or Marburg, or perhaps a mutation of both. The people at the monkey house and the Army begin to panic. Deadly filoviruses such as these are never seen outside of Africa, yet alone in a suburb outside Washington D.C. If it is discovered to be one of these viruses, citizens could be in danger. The C.D.C is called in and two teams are made up. The C.D.C will be in charge of citizens at risk and USAMRIID will look after the monkey house itself and the monkeys inside. Jerry Jaax, Nancy's husband, is assigned head of the monkey house mission.
Science Facts:
I came across a lot of different facts that were just little tidbits of info, so I couldn't really do a full wiki post on them but I wanted to include them anyway, mainly so I don't forget them. So, I decided to make a little section on my wiki for all the different facts I found, and here it is!
Fact 1 - There are more insects in one square miles of soil than there are human beings on earth! Not only that, but the average human consumes about 430 insects every year of their lives, intended or unintend... Gross.
Personal post: number one -
Sociologists use Twitter to obverse "late-day slumps" in users
I can bet that everyone uses at least some form social media such as Twitter or Facebook. Our status updates or "tweets", more often than not, tend to be something about our moods or imply something about the mood we're in. That's why sociologists have decided to use "tweets" on Twitter to observe the patterns of our moods throughout the day. They observed more then 2.4 millions tweets from 84 different countries and divided them up by hours of the day and days of the week. The mood patterns showed that our moods tend to drop just after breakfast. All countries showed these patterns, despite the different cultures. They then decided to run them through a program developed by psychologists which gives back one of hundreds of different words such as "happy", "anxious" and "fearful" to measure feelings. Overall, they observed that people are most upbeat in the morning and their mood goes down from there. Just after supper on through the time they go to bed, it picks up again. At first, scientist thought this might be because of the stress of the work (or in our case school) day. But the weekday patterns were almost identical to the weekend patterns. They tend stated that sleep plays a huge factor on our daily mood patterns, based on previous research.
But this isn't the only way sociologists are using social media to observe human behavior. They also use it to do other studies such as what makes people the happiest, or even using it to track diseases and epidemics! All in all, social media allows sociologists and behavior scientists to observe human behavior and interaction in ways that haven't been able to before.
The only thing we need to keep in mind is these are just people who have access to Twitter. As sociologist Thomas Streeter says, "these aren't farmers in Zimbabwe."
Citations - Danigelis, A. (2011, September 30).Twitter confirms late-day slump. Retrieved from http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2011/09/30/3329648.html
Personal post: number two -
Spontaneous animal explosion?!In April of 2005, body's of amphibians were discovered in a pond near Hamburg, in Germany. The body's were toads, swollen to the point were they had burst! Their body's were three and a half times their normal size. People said they would see the frogs crawling along the ground and they would begin to swell. The frogs would swell so much they would just explode right on the spot. Scientists suspected that there must be some sort of virus or fungi in the pond which was infecting the toads, causing them to swell and burst.
Eventually though, one scientist, Frank Mutschmann, came to a conclusion. They noticed small circular incisions on the backs of all the dead toads. These holes were small enough to be the incision of a bird's beak. Surely enough, he discovered all of these toads livers were missing! These toads had been murdered by a bunch of hungry crows. The crows were clever enough to know that a toads skin is poisonous, so it wouldn't be any good to eat anyways. The crows made an incision, extracted the liver of the toad and ate it! Once the toad realizes its liver is missing, it puffs up as a defense mechanism. Since it has no ribs and now no liver, there is nothing to hold the rest of its organs inside. It's lungs inflated and ripped, and the rest of the organs just expel themselves. Mutschmann thinks this phenomenon occur because it was the frogs mating season. While the frogs were busy, the crows came down and pecked them on the back, extracting their liver. The process wouldn't be particularly painful, so the frogs wouldn't really notice.
Citations - Mystery of german exploding toads. (2005, April 27). Retrieved from http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4486247.stm
Elkins, R. (2005, May 8). Stone the crows! exploding toad case solved. Retrieved from http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/stone-the-crows-exploding-toad-case-solved-489894.html
Personal post: number three -
His twin was living inside him......Sanju Bhagat had always been conscious of his abnormally large belly. He was living in the village of Nagpur, India went one night, he could barely breath. He was rushed to the hospital, as the doctors thought he must have a large tumor on his diaphragm. They decided to operate immediately to re leave him of his symptoms. As Dr. Ajay Mehta cut into Sanju's body to remove the tumor, he found something completely horrifying. First, he saw a hand inside his stomach. Next, he pulled out limbs, hair, jaws, feet with long toenails, and even reproductive organs. Dr. Mehta was completely shocked and confused with what he found, a mutated body inside Sanju Bhagat's stomach. What really happen, was that Mehta had removed Sanju's twin from inside him, an extremely rare case of fetus in fetu. There are only about 90 cases of this recorded in medical history. How it happens is one fetus wraps around the other in the womb. One fetus becomes trapped inside the other, while the dominant fetus grows throughout the pregnancy. The trapped fetus lives of its host twin like a sort of parasite by forming a sort of umbilical cord structure that connects to the host's blood supply. Usually, both of the twins will die before birth due to the strain of sharing a placenta. But in Sanju's case, he was delivered and his twin continued to grow inside him. No one could have suspected that his own twin was living inside him for 36 years. There are people who do believe that this particular case is a hoax, although "fetus in fetu" is a true abnormality.
This is the video I found on the ABC news website...
just a warning - they show some weird hand thing they supposedly found inside his stomach, so if you don't really enjoy that kind of stuff, I probably wouldn't watch it.
Citations -
Man with twin living inside him. (2006, August 23). Retrieved from http://abcnews.go.com/Health/story?id=2346476&page=1
Personal post: number four -
Bubonic Plague
There isn't a plague that has really affected the world like the bubonic plague did during the fourteenth century. It was known as the Black Death, because of its notorious black patches it formed on the skin of the sick. The disease was spread through mice and other rodents aboard merchant ships. The fleas on these rodents would live off their blood, and eventually transfer the disease to the crew aboard the ship. Many of the sailors died immediately at sea, and the disease was spread as the ships docked all over Europe. Within three years, Spain, France, Russia and England were all infected.
Sore limbs was the first sign of the plague. Next, the lymph glands would swell to the point that they would burst. These glands are located on the neck, armpits and groin. The bubonic plague is origin from the word Buboes, meaning swollen glands.
Death by the plague was extremely swift, yet horrifying. It's victims were in immense pain as their bodies grew more grotesque with gruesome black markings. Europeans were completely terrified. Plague doctors were hired specially to treat those with the plague, count death tallies and investigate the disease. It was an extremely dangerous job.
The reason this disease was spread so easily was because of the Middle Age Europe's living conditions. People lived in extremely crowded surroundings were hygiene was not promoted. Citizens were advised not to bathe, as they believed the disease would enter through opened pores. Since the refrigerator had yet to be invented as well, people often ate diseased or stale meats. But, the devastation of the plague did lead to advances in medicine. Hospitals were built and new sanitation laws were enforced.
Citations -
http://www.mrdowling.com/703-plague.html
Personal post; number five -
It's Physics, but..... The 10 Dimensions
So I know this is Physics, and it is just a theory... but Mr. Smith showed our Physics class this video a few months ago now, and it blew my mind. Here is the video, inspired by the book "Imagining the Tenth Dimension" by Rob Bryanton. He explains the first 10 dimensions in his own theory... so watch the video now.... (you may even want to watch it a few times to really get it)
Mind blown right? I became interested in this, so I did a little further research on it. I found a little exert on how we perceive the dimensions. Technically, we are three dimensional creatures, but we only see things in two dimensions. Right now, you're probably thinking, what? I can see the third dimension, I can tell the difference between a 2D and 3D object. Yes, you can. But, that doesn't mean you're seeing it. Think of it this way, without a point of reference or light hitting an object, you can't see or perceive depth. If an object was moving away from you and expanding in equal proportion, how would you be able to tell that object was moving away from you? We only perceive the third dimension because of the points of reference around us, and the light that is constantly around us, giving the object different hues of light according to its distance from the light source (lighter at one end, darker at the other). We can't really see the third dimension, but there is no question that it is there. As three dimensional organisms, we can only see the second dimension and perceive the third.
This is just a theory. You can take want you want from it, I just thought it was wiki post worthy:)
Citations -
http://www.tenthdimension.com/flash2.php
Homework post; number one -
Our genetics and how they decide whether we'll catch a flu or not
Ever wonder why some people are more prone to getting sick than others? To me, it seems like there are certain people who never seem to get sick and I've always wondered why. Alfred Hero and his team of researchers also wanted to know why, so they set up an experiment. They injected 17 volunteers with with a strain of a disease called H3N2 or Wisconsin. Out of these 17 volunteers, nine of them became sick. Some others injected reported feeling slightly under the weather, but they weren't actually ill. The researches then decided to study the activity of genes in the blood of the volunteers. They drew this blood from them prior to being injected with the flu and then again every eight hours for five days after the infection. The genes in the blood revealed some pretty astonishing patterns. They found that in the genes of those who got sick activated immune chemicals that caused inflammation. Their gene patterns could predict how sick they would get up to 36 hours before. The genes of those people who stayed well activated anti-inflammation as well as antioxidant. These gene patterns can help doctors determine what patients are at risk of becoming seriously ill. But, they still need to do a follow up study to determine whether the pattern is determined by a persons genetic makeup. The researches also found that those who became sick tended to spread more of the virus than those who stayed well. Therefore, gene activity patterns may be able to help determine which patients also need to be quarantined to help prevent the spread of infections or viruses.
Citations - Tina Hesman, S. (n.d.). Genes may explain who gets sick from flu. Science News, Retrieved from http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/333601/title/Genes_may_explain_who_gets_sick_from_flu
Homework post; number two -
My Personal View on Stem Cell Research
The Hot Zone Posts:
Homework post; number three -
The Hot Zone: Part One - The Shadow of Mount Elgon
The Hot Zone is a work of fiction about four, extreme pathogens who are all filoviruses: Ebola Zaire, Ebola Sudan, Ebola Reston and the Marburg virus.
The first part of the Hot Zone is divided up into seven chapters. The novel begins by introducing Charles Monet, a French expatriate working and living in Kenya. He visits takes a trip to Mount Elgon around New Year's Day in 1980 and visits Kitum Cave. Soon after, he becomes extremely ill and has to be flown to a hospital, where he "crashes and bleeds out". While he is bleeding and vomiting uncontrollably, some of Charles' vomit gets into one of the doctor's eyes who was working on him; the doctor is Dr. Musoke. Charles Monet falls into a coma and isn't able to recover, so he dies of the deadly virus. Dr. Musoke falls ill with the same virus, but miraculously recovers 10 days later. No one knows why. The virus is later discovered to be the Marburg virus, a filovirus and a close relative of the Ebola virus. A young boy named Peter Cardinal also becomes ill with a relative of the Marburg virus, and soon after dies. Samples of his blood are also taken for research.
A village in Sudan breaks out. The hospital is terrorized by the virus and is practically vacant. A young nurse named Nurse Mayinga is infected by a nun and later dies. Samples of her blood are collected by the CDC and taken back to Atlanta. Nancy Jaax is introduced. She gets the opportunity to work with the Ebola virus during her first time wearing a biological space suit. A small rip in her suit causes her to be exposed to the virus, but it does not enter her blood stream through the small cut on her hand, so she remains healthy.
With the help of Gene Johnson, Nancy learns that the strain of virus can be transmitted through air when they conduct experiments on monkeys who are 20 feet apart and they all become ill and die, even those who were kept controlled. Gene Johnson then takes a team to Kitum Cave, in hopes of finding Ebola or Marburg in its natural habitat. He has no luck when none of the animals there are found to be carrying the virus.
Homework post; number four -
The Hot Zone: Part Two - The Monkey House
The second part of the Hot Zone is about a monkey house in Reston, Virginia. Monkeys are imported her from the Philippines and then sold across the country. The main focus of this section is when one of the main workers at the monkey house, Dan Dalgard, notices some of the monkeys are getting sick. He is slightly worried, since all the monkeys are supposed to be checked to be healthy before entering the country. Soon, the illness starts spreading to other monkeys in that room of the monkey house, and then to other rooms in the monkey house. The monkeys are dying; it's suspected that it is a case of Simian fever, a disease very lethal to monkeys but does not harm humans. Dan Dalgard gets a bit more worried about the situation and the Army becomes involved. An intern at USAMRIID photographs the virions inside a piece of monkey meat sent from the monkey house and believes he has observed a filovirus, specifically Marburg. The heads of the department are called to confirm, and one it is confirmed, Nancy Jaax is assigned to dissect some monkeys and discover what type of virus it really is.
After dissecting the dead, liquefying monkey meat, Nancy can't tell whether it is Ebola Zaire or Marburg, or perhaps a mutation of both. The people at the monkey house and the Army begin to panic. Deadly filoviruses such as these are never seen outside of Africa, yet alone in a suburb outside Washington D.C. If it is discovered to be one of these viruses, citizens could be in danger. The C.D.C is called in and two teams are made up. The C.D.C will be in charge of citizens at risk and USAMRIID will look after the monkey house itself and the monkeys inside. Jerry Jaax, Nancy's husband, is assigned head of the monkey house mission.
Science Facts:
I came across a lot of different facts that were just little tidbits of info, so I couldn't really do a full wiki post on them but I wanted to include them anyway, mainly so I don't forget them. So, I decided to make a little section on my wiki for all the different facts I found, and here it is!
Fact 1 - There are more insects in one square miles of soil than there are human beings on earth! Not only that, but the average human consumes about 430 insects every year of their lives, intended or unintend... Gross.